full of crap over at Classical Values. One bit:
To Marx value was raw material plus work. The means of producing that work (machinery, etc) were just sort of there. And he made no allowance for invention. (Which is why though Marxist revolutions often recruit intellectuals they're the sort of intellectuals who never had an original idea in their life.) Of course in our day and age, invention and original thought are at least as important as machinery in creating product. Also, the raw material fallacy means all the countries who have nothing else to sell feel "exploited" because we're taking their "value" away. Imbuing raw material itself with value means that it's sort of like stealing national treasure. This has given rise to an entire colonialist-exploitation-theory of history which has held more people in misery in developing countries than the most brazen robber baron could manage. And no one, NOT ONE seems to realize that their raw materials mean absolutely nothing if not used. If someone doesn't have an idea to use it. If the finished product is not good for something. In other words, if you're not producing something that someone else finds useful. (I.e. enough to pay for.) If the relationship isn't MUTUALLY beneficial.
I can't remember who is was, the first time I read of the 'stealing the treasure of the indigenous people' garbage, who called bullshit on it in a very plain way; as he pointed out, if someone had not developed technologies that used oil, the mid-East would still be a bunch of camel & goatherds raiding each other to steal wives and raping the livestock because without someone needing it that oil is worthless. Still true, and why the oil ticks live in dread of someone finding a practical substitute for oil.
5 comments:
"...why the oil ticks live in dread of someone finding a practical substitute for oil"
Change that to "allow a better technology to be used" and I'd agree.
Fire up the nukes for power and use petroleum for chemical feedstocks.
Either way. Obama's supposedly pushing for nuke plants, but I'll believe it when they actually break ground.
Nuke plants for electricity, lots of oil freed up for other uses, and one of these days a better tech to run the engines.
There is good commercialised technology for synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons for transport fuel and lubricant oil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process
Assuming that the claims for shale gas are not just the latest in a long tradition of mining and resource scams to fleece investors,
then,
those coal mining areas which have access to natural gas have the ideal raw materials.
I forget which UK coal mine it was which was pumping more tons of methane each day than it was hauling tons of coal. They were burning the methane in a generator then selling electricity to the grid, and using the waste heat for heating the offices and water for the pit head showers.
For hundreds of years, Britain mined blackband and oolitic iron ores, containing about 40% iron. They never exhausted them, they were replaced by imported ores from places like Australia, containing about 80% iron.
The only mineral that I think has ever been worked to exhaustion is cryolite (it only had one source, Ivigtut in Greenland) and it is now synthesised, probably at lower cost. Everything else has been replaced long before exhaustion.
I think we might be at "peak (Arab) oil", but not for the reasons that the malthusians claim.
Let's have the Fischer Tropsch plants and the nukes built and we can let the Chinese have the Arabs and Chavez.
The Chinese are just a bit less likely to indulge them with kindness and sympathy when they shit on the carpet.
The Saudis won't disclose what their resource and reserve figures are. Perhaps because everyone would loose interest and sympathy with the wahabi-ist camel shaggers if we realised that they are not the oil treasure house that we thought they were.
Eff em.
As "blert", who comments over at Belmont Club points out, we are probably at the time of "peak moslems", as without oil to sell, they have nothing to buy food for their rapidly expanding populations with, and they're too damn illiterate to grow food, or to limit their own population growth (despite Ghadaffi Duck's collectivist attempts at population reduction over the past week).
He also points out that we're at peak government too.
The money has all been spent, and there is no more to give to the bloated vested interest groups who've attached themselves to the various political parties, which in turn milk and shear we the sheeple, for their benefit.
We're seeing in Wisconsin, the reason for signs saying "Don't feed the bears".
The bear doesn't understand that you have run out of food to give it, and tries to eat you instead.
I think we'll see lots of hungry bears and hungry mo-ham-head-ists dying off in the next few years.
Time I got my metals portfolio up to date:
-need more lead and more brass...
Marx really effed things up.
I've been listening to a series of talks by Murray Rothbard, from the '80s (they're free downloads from Mises.org).
Apart from crap sound quality, and Rothbard's annoying habit of chuckling at his own thoughts while he is speaking, they are really interesting).
He covers some of the early religious communists, like the pietists, who, like all attempts at communism, soon ended up with starvation and mass murder.
Marx made his communism athiest, and only got into economics in his attempts to work out how to achieve what he thought was inevitable.
Rothbard said that some poems, written by Marx at age 12, and not published until the late 20th century put his whole life's work into context.
He'd written about how he wanted to destroy the universe because God, not Marx, had created it.
There's an interesting resource story with the Chinese stopping exports of Indium.
Seems the discovery of Indium in South Crofty mine in Cornwall is the sweetener that it needed to restart tin mining.
There are a couple of guys who I've known for years, on the staff there. So China's export restriction is great news for them.
I met a bloke a few years ago who had indium and tellurium poisoning (two of the rarest elements on earth!), probably from his well water. I'll have to go look in that area again.
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